Game publishers have spent years proving that they can announce almost anything without renting a convention hall.
A trailer can appear on YouTube at breakfast. A carefully rehearsed livestream can reveal six games before lunch. Nintendo can summon millions of viewers simply by posting the words “Direct tomorrow,” while smaller studios can unveil a project from somewhere with considerably cheaper coffee than a German exhibition centre.
After E3 disappeared, the industry appeared to have reached a verdict: the giant gaming show belonged to another era.
Gamescom 2026 has arrived to complicate that story.
More than 1,600 exhibitors from 67 countries are attending this year’s event in Cologne. The exhibition covers 233,000 square metres, while the indie area alone contains more than 420 companies. According to Gamescom’s organizers, each figure represents growth over last year.
This is not a convention surviving on nostalgia. It is getting physically bigger at precisely the moment the internet was supposed to make it unnecessary.
The trailer was never the whole point
Gamescom opened this week with the familiar blast of announcements, release dates and suspiciously pristine gameplay footage.
PlayStation’s Opening Night Live roundup included 19 upcoming games, ranging from Final Fantasy VII Revelation and Metro 2039 to Control Resonant, Silent Hill: Townfall and the full December release of Path of Exile 2.
Anyone watching from home received the important information. They saw the trailers, learned the dates and immediately began explaining in comment sections why everyone else’s favourite announcement was wrong.
That part of the convention has been thoroughly digitized.
What cannot be uploaded quite so easily is the density of the place.
A major convention puts developers, publishers, journalists, streamers and players inside the same sprawling building. Games can be played instead of merely presented. Smaller studios can benefit from people wandering past a booth they never would have searched for online. Conversations begin without an algorithm deciding whether they deserve distribution.
The internet is excellent at delivering something people already know they want. A convention is unusually good at putting something unexpected directly in their path.
That distinction is especially important for independent developers. Digital storefronts may contain thousands of games, but abundance does not guarantee visibility. Sometimes it creates the opposite problem: an excellent project can sit quietly beneath a mountain of discounts, sequels and unusually determined farming simulators.
Gamescom’s expanded indie area offers a temporary escape from that sorting system. A small game does not need to defeat the entire internet. For a few days, it only needs to catch the attention of someone walking down the aisle.
Gamescom learned to share the room
The continued strength of the physical event does not mean Gamescom resisted the internet. It means the convention learned how to include it.
In 2023, Gamescom reported 320,000 physical visitors and more than 180 million digital views. Attendance rose to 335,000 in 2024, while digital views climbed beyond 310 million. Last year, approximately 356,000 people attended and Gamescom content accumulated 1.1 billion video-on-demand views, according to the organization’s worldwide event figures.
Those numbers use different digital measurements from year to year, so they should not be treated as a perfectly tidy growth chart. The broader direction is still difficult to miss: the online audience expanded without emptying the halls.
Xbox’s presence illustrates how the two sides now work together. Its Gamescom booth includes playable games, developer appearances and accessible demo stations, but the company is also broadcasting directly from the show floor on YouTube and Twitch.
Someone in Cologne gets the noise, the queues and the hands-on demo. Someone in Vancouver can watch the developer interview without acquiring jet lag or spending twelve euros on convention-centre lunch. Neither experience has to invalidate the other.
Xbox has also equipped its booth with adaptive controllers, adjustable desks and monitors, a quiet room, sensory items and sign-language support. Its streams include American Sign Language and English audio descriptions. Accessibility is not perfect simply because a company lists accommodations, but these measures demonstrate another benefit of treating the show as both a physical and digital event: participation does not have to mean entering the same room in the same way.
E3’s ending was not the end of the format
It would be too simple to say livestreaming killed E3 and Gamescom somehow escaped.
E3 faced its own collection of problems involving cost, scheduling, industry support and an identity that became increasingly difficult to explain. Its disappearance proved that publishers no longer needed one particular event to reach an audience. It did not prove that audiences had stopped wanting events.
Gamescom offers something more flexible.
Publishers can make announcements on their own schedules while still using the convention as a shared deadline. Fans can follow everything online while hundreds of thousands of people give the event a physical sense of importance. Large companies receive a global stage, while smaller developers gain a brief chance to be discovered outside the usual storefront machinery.
The giant gaming convention survived by becoming more than a delivery system for trailers.
It became a place and a broadcast, a trade show and a public festival, a week in Cologne and countless smaller moments distributed across the internet. The screens did not replace the room. They made the room larger.
The internet did not kill the big gaming show after all. It merely forced the show to justify why anyone should still turn up.
Gamescom appears to have found an answer.
